Take One (Jan 1978)

re ge Re a ES. And yét the voice no one can ever forget is the sparkling tenor of .Michigan J. Frog in Chuck Jones’s classic ‘‘One Froggy Evening’’—rich, pearly tones less reminiscent of a frog than anything in the world, Yosemite Sam, one of the tiniest humans ever put on film, has the biggest voice in the range of the optical track (the only voice Blanc can’t do without getting red in the face). June Foray thought it was the most logical thing possible when she gave a full-sized elephant the tiniest voice she could muster: ““Because she’s such a great big, enormous, gigantic, elephantine creature—that a tiny voice would fit her. Haven’t you seen a lot of very fat ladies... and they have tiny, little-girl voices? Maybe because they wish they were smaller.”’ It all makes perfect sense, really. If something immaculately appropriate, but exaggerated for comic effect, works well, then something with exaggerated inappropriateness will work better. It was always the special province of the great animation directors to make insuperably believable the most wildly impossible, implausible, and illogical events. And it was often the soundtrack, its clamorous sound effects and its outrageous vocals, that provided the clincher when it came to putting a cartooned action across. With few Scatman Crothers recording the voice of Scat Cat for The Aristocats. ‘‘An imposing fortress of tracheal membranes and a relentless round of training and development."’ The voice no one can ever forget is the sparkling tenor of Michigan J. Frog in Chuck Jones’s classic ““One Froggy Evening.” exceptions, the animation that inspires reverence today is animation created after the coming of sound. But the great (and the near-great) sound cartoons of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties are distinguished from the (not by any stretch of the imagination great) silent cartoons of the Teens and Twenties by considerably more than their narrow sliver of soundtrack. To compare just about any silent cartoon with just about any sound cartoon is to bring the point home with a vengeance. The comparison is so stacked as to be unfair. Look at ‘‘Where Am I?,’’ a Mutt & Jeff episode of 1925. 1925 is the year of The Gold Rush, The Merry Widow, Seven Chances, The Big Parade, The Freshman, The Phantom of the Opera— some of the grandest that Hollywood ever produced. ‘‘Where Am I?,”’ one of the best of all silent cartoons, is the work of talented amateurs by comparison. The sixteen years that separate it from a 1941 Disney feature like Dumbo are paltry in comparison to the 53 years that separate The Great Train Robbery from The Searchers, but the same kind of filmic development is in evidence. In ‘‘Where Am I?’’ Jeff finds himself with a pot on his head and spends the picture trying to get it off (by such practical means as spinning around in circles and waving his hands in an arc). He works his way by this stratagem to the top of an uncompleted skyscraper, wobbling among the girders and ladders in a fashion inspired perhaps by the Harold Lloyd acrobatics in High and Dizzy and Safety Last (and probably inspiring, in its turn, later and more astonishing cartoons like ‘‘A Dream Walking,’’ ‘Clock Cleaners,’’ ‘“Homeless Hare,’’ and ‘‘Cat Feud’’). In one awe-inspiring hyper-angled down shot, Jeff, blind to the dizzying perspective, slips off a girder and tumbles in helpless pirouettes toward the traffic bustling below, and, seconds before smashing to his death, just when things look blackest for him, he miraculously scrambles back up again, still blind, still helpless, and secures a foothold on the selfsame girder, plummeting from full view down to a pinpoint on the screen and right back up to full view in one breathless shot. The effect is funny, it gets a laugh, but, like the film’s ‘‘resolution’’ (the ending leaves Jeff, pot on head, blind, stuck on the girders, no hope in sight), and like its cursory dispensing of the team’s straightman (in an early shot Mr. Mutt is metamorphosed into a buzz saw and drills himself into the ground and that takes care of him), the success of this one joke is dependent on the What-the-Hell atmosphere engendered by the whole, and remains quite independent of such niggling rejoinders as ‘Yeah, but what is it that propels him upwards again?”’ or ‘‘Why should the central figure find himself barely visible to the audience at the very point of the dramatic turnabout?’” or even ‘What is logical or inevitable about this unexpected outcome to a very tangible and frighteningly conveyed situation?’’ or, more subtle, ‘‘What is it about this character’s delineation or motivation that makes this turnabout in any way satisfying emotionally?’’ The logical questions are never asked because no one watching is involved enough to ask them. Dumbo’s climactic scene, the mute elephant descending precipitously to the sawdust floor, his best friend The Mouse howling panic-stricken words of encouragement into his oversized ears, the last-minute triumphant swoop into the air, the upending of lifelong foes into buckets—all this parallels ‘Where Am I?’’ in physical movement only: in emotional effect the scenes are worlds are apart. 21